"And for my picture of America, I found one on the net, on some freebie angelfire.com webpage by some guy who used to be a Marine or really likes the Marines or his brother was a Marine or something (it really wasn't clear which). It was a photo of my father, in his shorts, his mouth shaped like a big O and his forehead glistening from sweat as he leans into the steering bar of his lawn mower. There were two captions on the pic too, in big red computery font letters. FUELED BY MARX says the caption up top, and on the bottom of the photo, RULED BY SATAN."
(from Nick Mamatas' Under my Roof, which everyone needs to read)
"Anyone who does choose to write it should not neglect the political tenor to't: ECW is an avowed Marxist."
Oh shit, they're on to me!
"It's possible that the entire 'genre' consists largely of one dude (the Socialism and/or Barbarism guy, Evan Calder Williams)"
---
Dressed as a Trojan horse
with sticky fur & paint & slack eyes
we sneak ourselves into
our own city
How else does pestilence
ever come to be unwelcome
The solar system had its origin in a gigantic star into which a smaller, dead, waterlogged star fell
An "astronomy of the invisible."
Hans Hörbiger's Welteislehre (World Ice Theory), known previously as Glazial-Kosmogonie (Glacial Cosmogony) before he felt the need to further Germanize it, is an extravagant, crystal bleak, obstinately unfounded, and gorgeous theory. In short, the basic substance of the solar system is ice: ice moons and ice plants move through global ether made of... ice. It's the frosty, scraping motion of winter rendered infinite. No big bang, just the wet thwup of a sodden dead star smacking into a immense burning sun, sizzled vapor spray, splattering out into empty space. Radially drifting slow, freezing into elementary matter.
It is, of course, a theory with no ground, a thought cut loose and resutured to the apparatus of looking-like-science, even as it purports to be a kosmotechnische Weltanschauung (a cosmotechnical world view).
And then there's its nasty introduction to the ranks of melancholic Nazi pseudo-science. It was employed both as a counter to the "Jewish" science (of things such as experimental verifiability, observable phenomena, and cosmologies not based entirely on a combination of rad dreams you happen to have and the fact that indeed the moon does look a bit icy at times) and as a cosmically grounded racial climatology.
Some followers even attended astronomical meetings to heckle, shouting, "Out with astronomical orthodoxy! Give us Hörbiger!"
"Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man."
This held aside for a moment. (Though it is never truly aside, let alone gone or mediated, it can only be aside for a brief, slippery moment because the linkage between its order of worlds and the attempted ordering of this world in accordance with Nazi anthropological thought is not accidental or surpassable. critical negativity aside, it's there, not-disavowable. Elsewhere I want to think about the fundamental melancholy of the aesthetic that underpins much of far-right and Aryan-supremacist iconography and cosmology, black suns to gloom ice ether, lost unwinnable battles repeated hysterically, the lostness of a grounding ethnic lineage built from scratch and misreadings that knows itself damn well to be as such.) For this now, I'm struck by the shape of this thought, as if it could be told otherwise, closer to this:
Hörbiger's whole enterprise is a fact of speculative thinking reaching its peak, beginning from a near lyric moment of potential misprision - weird, I just realized that the moon looks like a bunch of ice stacked together - that unfolds, dizzying itself like those spinning actors out and out. Rather than saying yes, many things look like ice when the sunlight hits them correctly, for example, that car windshield which I know not to be eternal, order-founding ice, the cosmological is built teetering, toppling out, telling science to fuck off while clinging to its hems, all to bind the universe as such to a solitary judgment. Like the pendulum of which Hörbiger dreamt, growing longer and longer until it broke, the world ice theory lengthens from a fulcrum untethered and stretching out an instance of total intentionality (all must be objectively as it seemed to me at that moment), produces an entire system, and consequently threatens such a first thought, such a cosmopolitics, such a nostalgia, such a fading illumination.
How does it threaten it? (Mid-way note: what follows borrows the same principle/remains tentatively faithful to Hörbiger's reasoning, that's to say: stretch the pendulum, throw the fragments out to see what else they gather, and circulate amongst the declining returns of such thinking, in its breakdowns and autophagy.)
Halted, glacial, gloomy, and falsely eternal as it is, the system undoes its apparent stasis - be ever faithful to the originary ice! - on its own terms: as an instance of the accelerating motion of thought itself, as a fantasmatic cosmopolitics, and as an acceleration which cannot be contained by the trappings of eternality. The gap between a frozen thought and a thought to which clings the aura of frozenness, with fallout on all sides. In this system, matter (the matter we access and see, of this solar system, of what can be tarried to our experience) takes form in accordance with the action of condensation and freezing. The ground of our experience is the crystallization of a flung chunk of that "first" wet star, some necrological foundation granule around which vapor can recondense, harden, and become the Earth, become moon, become unnamed chunks.
Two things from this. First, the binding is temporary - it always is - and dependent on the coldness as a negative value: the basic condition for this genesis of what knowably exists is passage through what it is not and what threatens it. The cold is not flaming gas or the friction of impact, and this not alone gives shape to the scattered material. And what is it giving shape to? Not the genesis of all form out of what could be, but this particular arrangement, this solar system. There lies the second point: this is not an origin story of the universe. The universe prefigures, predates, and exists independently of our ice-worlds. Stars burn and die, stones melt into liquid and cool again. And the rules still apply here, in this corner of it, even as the order here is exceptional, founded through a confrontation with the prime figure - a gigantic star - of that other order. The dominance of ice, as organizational and generational principle, of hardening into shapes solid enough to stand and think on, comes about through the collision with the exorbitant, consumptive, light-producing center of simultaneous expenditure and transfer. (And we then ask: what happened to that other star, the one slammed with the wet dead sponge? Does it keep burning a little quieter now, its heat irrevocably dimmed by the vaporization, by the act that made all this possible? Was it fully consumed and splattered in that instant, now part of the rain of ice across the dark? Or, hardest to take on, did it matter not a whit? Its scale so large, equivalent to spitting in the desert, a soft hiss and nothing is changed? Except for Hörbiger, who could see in that petty drool's evaporation the possibility of crystal spheres, dark masses racing toward other collisions...)
The half-step to the politics of this, and the allure to the Nazis, is an easy one, and it has little to do with the simple equation of Nordic = ice, even as such an commensurability remains the initial operation of linkage. It's more than just the sense that it's convenient to have the meterological standards of your chosen lineage reflected in the solar system more broadly. Instead, it's in the sense both of voluntary decision and interruption that rests on the back of a eternalizing realism which it nevertheless dismantles. That's to say: beyond the lingering rhetorical play of eternal ice and thousand year Reichs, a fascist cosmology, or one accessible to use by Nazis, requires an unprecedented event (the dead star collision) to which we have to adhere and work to protect, all the more so because it is opposed to both general opinion founded on principles of "proof" and observation and, moreover, because it is opposed to the general laws of the universe, which constantly threaten ice. The theory, and the cosmos it describes, backs itself willfully into a corner, hackles up, and declares itself under siege. As Hörbiger told Willi Ley, "Either you believe in me and learn, or you will be treated as the enemy."
Moreover, in spite of the founding of a total correlation (people from "pure" icy lands = "pure" icy solar system, the step toward purification is evident), the event that makes it come into being is entirely opposed: it is a violent, annihilating confrontation that results not in the arid cold shards of Northern sentiment, but a warm, wet spray of filth that can only take pure ice shape because it is not pure, because there are particles around which the water can form. (Or worse, for the Nazis, god forbid that water picked up some other dirt floating around: what if the ice moons and ice planets aren't even direct, clean descendents of that first dead star!) At once the sense that this white ice is the rule of the cosmos and that it must be asserted as such because it very clearly isn't. Born of the possibility of its own undoing, much like the suspension of law in the rhetorical name of the restoration of order, the exceptional ice gathers its forces to reconvene a first moment dark to it, when ice as dominant principle was not there. It aims to produce new, icier dead stars, far colder than that damp becoming, so that the confrontation with the "central" star, with what embodies for us the exorbitancy of the universe and the threat to white eternality, wouldn't survive. The dead white sun returns home harder, and the outcome is the snuffing out of light and heat itself.
Two options.
The flourishing and buttressing of ice worlds into bridged, halted shapes, a dead city of the solar system, an extension of its logic - because we were ahead of the game, we know existence from ice - out to other parts of the universe. Tenuous, spider-silk think linkages before too weak to hold bind harder, connective glacial tissue bound closer. The storms of icy ether firm up, become blocks, new planets. Negative space itself becomes whitely solid, oceans of milky nothing with no room for movement. The general thermodynamic rules still apply, as they have, and so the principle that brings life to an end, the promise of extinction, becomes the guarantor of the extension of this other lifeless way of being. The reign of ice spreads wider. The frozen decay that that sustains, on which we walk, that spins beneath us, is not a hold out against what may come but a precursive image, the eye of the permafrost ice storm.
Unless it's all inverted. Taking on Hörbiger's speculative gesture, as it inverts known laws in order to occasion that moment of the pendulum's snap and float off, deserves an imagined, impossible, thermodynamics in reverse, the extropic swelling of heat. As if cold was a positive value, leeched away to nodes of thermal energy.
Starving, consumptive anti-suns that suck the cold right out of it all.
And everything will melt. All the shapes on which our knowing seemed possible, which we thought formed in our judgment, we thought guaranteed by warmth and light, finds itself betrayed. Not a warm fire to which we cling, but a leech of our potential coldness and coherency, the constant threat. Following out to a cosmological level what I wrote about Frankenstein and the threat of warmth, it's the opening all out to non-form, not just isolation and singularity. Not the colonization of anti-social zones of potential secession or misanthropic retreat. No, it's back to vapors one and all, across the board flung and drawn. Being becomes a fogged and inconstant hothouse. Those ancestral bacteria buried deep in the ice are warmed, by the theft of cold, and woken. They come to be, teeming, at the very moment that there is no ground to stand on, as the globe ends, just a trailing trail of steam. The wet, hot, panting breath of unformed life as the solar system falls apart. Existence's last collapse, the slow hissing gasp of all that is solid melting into fuming slush.
A shadow over much of the city
Barring, or due to, his rather unnerving enthusiasm ("I love the way the mountain range casts a shadow over much of the city. There’s also a second peak in the Tenderloin (which I’m dubbing Mt. Loin)"), Doug McCune's striking topographical mapping of SF crime here, if crime were elevation. Perversely, to actualize this and relandscape the city accordingly would result in the vertiginous peaks of crime - now the best view in town - facing instantaneous gentrification and explosion of real estate values, leaving the "good parts of town" shrouded in darkness until noon every day.
“We’re triaging the films,” Ms. Melville said, “so we can get to the worst case ones first."
Glimmers of highly inflammable hope, thrown into cold storage to halt degeneration, across the tyranny of distance: 75 or so "long-lost" American silent films found in the New Zealand Film archive. Shady emphasis on their "repatriation" aside, more exciting is this:
"The preserved films will be made public through archival screenings and as streaming videos on the preservation foundation’s Web site, filmpreservation.org."
and this:
"Among the discoveries are several films that underline the major contribution made by women to early cinema. “The Girl Stage Driver” (1914) belongs to a large subgenre that Mr. Abel has identified as “cowboy girl” pictures; “The Woman Hater” (1910) is an early vehicle for the serial queen Pearl White; and “Won in a Cupboard” (1914) is the earliest surviving film directed by Normand, the leading female star of Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies. The Clara Bow film “Maytime” (1923), presents the most famous flapper of the 1920s in an unusual costume role."
Speculative surrealism
Despite my disagreements, my at times snarky beef with things that start with "OO" (object oriented), yes, some of what interests me indeed bears resemblance to what has been coralled under that baggy name "speculative realism" (or certain elements of what falls beneath the sign). However, in my case, minus all the science and plus more Artaud. I "am," that's to say, a speculative surrealist. Doubly adrift and with a sneaking suspicion that so many of those figures and tropes of scientific thought employed in the scorched, or scorchable, wake of the manifest image of the human are, above all, predominantly aesthetic figures. The Lovecraft/Ligotti specificity of many of these figures is an initial tip-off, and we need to keep asking what is the dominant case: the figure that lets us think, however fleetingly, the ancestral, the extinctive, the accelerational, the entropic, or the often "unrepresentable" scientific research that underpins and supposedly drives the application of such figures. My money is on the former.
[Note toward a longer exigesis of what the hell I'm trying to do with my thinking in general, even as I'm not interested in developing a set of systemic principles: I push this way in part because I'm invested in a few projects that, for the sake of convenience, start with anti-prefixes: for example, something like a "disenlightenment" project for which turns of thought developed from cultural production and negative, auto-sabotaging political practices (hence my work on ornamental nihilism as a cultural tendency and on misanthropology) can play an analogical role in dismantling "correlationism." Not just as illustrative equivalencies that help us envision things so at odds with our dominant anthropic mode of thought that we just stammer, drool, and bleed from the eyes if we actually take it seriously. It's like reading Sutter Cane's original manuscript: we need the mass-market paperback version, and not just to help spread the bad word. Or so we think, for there is no originary and beyond-the-pale content in the manuscript: we see flashbacks of what has already been seen, in the film, in the novel being written as it goes, and hence it's symbolic, mediated, tamed from the start. There's nothing there that we can't handle other than the ultimately crushing possibility that what we've assumed to be ruptural, unthinkable, and devastating is in fact firmly centered in the sphere of what is comfortable and easily reconcilable with going on as if nothing happened.]
These aesthetic/tropic figures are slippery almost-captures of thought against the interest of the human, indeed. But they're selected not because they give evidential proof of the fallacies of psychological intention, agency, or belief, even if they can do that, but because we prefer a world in which tentacular behemoth worms creep through the belly of a black star than a world in which they do not. (Which is to say, we're perhaps right back where we started, with the image of how we want to be or not be, even if this image is a diagonal slash away, even if the hyperbolic, striving, overleaping distance away from the everyday toward the speculative, necrotic, and virulent is an ultimate index of just how hard it is to think otherwise.)
the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard
Reminder: tomorrow is Dead Duck Day, for all who somehow forgot to mark their calenders.
"After about 75 minutes, I had seen enough..."
The Good, The Bad, and The Riotous Canine
Time for a remake, indeed. (Song is "The Ecstasy of Gold" from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, not from Once Upon a Time in the West, though.)
However, give Loukanikos a Bronson harmonica, and we're there...
M.M.M.M.M.
machina multa minax minitatur muris
A giant machine that terribly threatens walls
(from the Annals of Quintus Ennius)
Archer and arched bleed alike
Insurrection, which does not exist, that's the point, is a diagonal cut away. A double-headed arrow, which wounds both the archer in the act of drawing back and the target when it falls. There's correspondence, but its other term, what it was the pejorative bastard cousin of - what we used to call revolution - isn't there, and definitely not as some haunted absence or trace. It's relation without a relative, adrift in the black, but stepping down and out. Hypotenuse of the knight's move.
That or the tired, somewhat strategic erasing of other words left on the board after an early morning section, with the end result of a two-bit Richter painting.
Further proof we're still living in the times of Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition
It's true I could serve coffee using my rear as a ledge (Jennifer Lopez)
[Two statements witnessed side by side on a TV playing in a bar]
Arctic infestation (On Frankenstein, secession, anti-social zones, and creeping life)
Forget nature, forget the sublime. It has nothing to do with a Gothic-bent refraction of individual melancholy, ontological horror, anxiety about having to face up to the bare fact of sex come your wedding night. As if the stain of the psyche means that every house is old, dark, and creepy, each mountain snow-clad and backlit. All sentences laborious and baroque.
Frankenstein is the choice of auto-exile, secession. For the world doesn't darkly warp to match its marked subject. Not claustrophobically bound to it, escapeless and swerveless, all under the shadow of two beings: the unholy affront to the natural order and the one who disowns it as such. And yet the world isn't malignant as a whole nor even with nasty pockets and ruptures of the brutal where it doesn't belong. No. The normal, the sunny, the populated, the generative, the familial, the social: it's all still there, and it marks a wide band in which all things fall (even to the point that your wretched Luciferian creature will wage his war on you there, on the terrain of the family, and, above all, on your wedding night when you're supposed to finally stop fucking around with dead bodies and start fucking around with a live one). And it can only be left behind actively. You don't stray down the wrong hallway, open a door, and suddenly, there's unholy terror lurking all along, infecting the day. Rather, Victor and creature alike search ceaselessly for literally anti-social sites, totally inhuman zones, to create a correspondence between subject and terrain that isn't there to start. In exile I belong.
They're frantic for the empty and dull, to exit the "neighborhood of man," and the task of making of another - a perfect wretch - from the scraps of this leaden social world is caught in such an exile's failure, a initial version to pull away from family and friends while doing "research." The full bloom of misanthropy that emerges in the war against humanity, to "glut the maw of death," the anti-social, takes first form in, and ultimately regresses back to, this more basic notion of the misanthrope as the loner, the asocial. So too geographically, as the dead birth of the creature occurs midway between the desert (where the creature and his potential mate will go to breed) and the arctic (where Victor and the creature will go to die).
The desert where nothing grows, the arctic where decay slows to a crawl.
Why, then, does Victor destroy the wretch's potential mate, after having already made/corpse-montaged her in full? Victor explains:
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?
Two things. First, Victor has been pretty hellbent on inflicting curses, given his utter unwillingness to accept not just his complicity (oh no, I played God, albeit in good faith, and now I can't stop this thing I made) but active driving of the situation into its catastrophic pitch (I will treat you so inhumanly that the only response possible is to fully become the monster I've demanded you be). Perhaps he has no right, but that doesn't stop him from inflicting, and cultivating masterfully, a curse that until now has remained unwilling to lash out beyond the minor, closely-inscribed circle of Victor's social world (even as such a world has been, for Victor, crushingly burdened with the thickness of the bourgeois social world per se, in which every personal decision functions against the backdrop of all norms, in which maybe not really wanting to raise a family with your cousin becomes a perverse affront to the very category of family).
Second, the slippage between the existence of the species and the existence of discrete instances of that species, between "the human race" and "some humans." What's elided in his comment, in the escape toward the species as a whole, is the fact that the very condition of existence is, for the vast majority of the world, precarious and full of terror. (A condition that describes nothing so well as that of the creature itself.) Should the general grounding condition of human existence come to be precarious and terrifying, via its opposition to a hostile counter-species, it would only mean that the definition now closely matches the reality of its instances. That the conditions of the human are no longer predicated upon the conditions of existence for a minority, whose minoritarian and elite status requires a mode of existence for the wretched rest that will necessarily mark them as beyond the pale, lagging behind, degenerated, or surplus of the worst kind. Victor, one of the few "humans" (i.e. not precarious and terrified), has to make a choice to make it the case: he willfully produces an existence, through the construction of one existent thing, that will extend a rippling, staining, corrupting precarity through the hard work of declaring something to belong to nothing and nowhere.
To belong anywhere other than the no man's land, that is.
For the actual terror at stake, the conditional terror, and the destructive urge to dismantle the recently assembled bride, are necessarily tied to the first horror of the creature's coming alive. Given all the messy, gory work that's gone into it and a real familiarity with the face and body of it (you built it, for fuck's sake), we just don't buy the shock at having made something unholy, that the trespasses against the chain of being are visible in the scabrous, cracking smile. No. It is vacancy under attack and the the threat of social, domestic, mediated experience filling that necrological blank slate. The entreating glance up at Daddy, then coming to hang out, a lumbering mass of non-knowledge, and you suddenly realize that all your blasphemy, all your labor of escaping the realm of productive labor, of generation itself, insisting not on development from scratch but montage from scrap: it's all going to be the same old thing, again, the same cycles of prohibition and shame, disappointment and playing nice. The ultimate flight from the realm of the social, the oikos and polis alike, into a vicious, spiteful, remarkable form of waste management won't be enough. The inhuman thing must be worked on to become what it should be. And that working on means leaving alone, on blocking it from the creep of the social.
And so too the zones, the desert, the arctic, the deserted and frozen. The threat isn't the human itself, that the new species-being will be that of always under attack from a race built from your leftovers, but the inhuman. Those few and far between remaining zones left untouched, the poles of not-us, not-here on which the normal social order depends and to which Victor is drawn incessantly as flight out of the everyday. Not that they might not leave Europe (that teeming, mediocre hinterland), but that they will leave Europe, they'll go to the desert and fill it up. And after that first copulation, the first generation born will themselves be more of the same. Sure, Mom and Dad look a bit funny, the stitch-marks remain, but after that, the desert's full up with Europe-ness, with its enemies who couldn't look elsewhere other than to the constructive source who disowned them.
We're voracious for the empty because the horizontal creep of the bourgeois social world is even more so, devouring in negative, a consumption that eats only lack and absence, filling, thickening all. It infects, into these humanless wounds. Not the body politic, but a rot setting in without primary matter to work upon.
In short: the horror is the shrinking capacity to leave behind, that even the desert will be just another brood and breed. The propagation of the race will flower desert without images (eine wüste Gegend), now full and teeming, more brood and breed, lost to the mindless furthering of growth. A resert desertification, and the race of devils soon wants in on the game, starts selling its labor cheap, polishes itself up nicely for EU membership and foreign investment, dragging in and desalinating the ocean, and the golf courses alone, in their startled green, retain a glimpse of that unnaturalness with which the whole thing started.
The desert where nothing grows, the arctic where decay slows to a crawl.
Why, then, does Victor destroy the wretch's potential mate, after having already made/corpse-montaged her in full? Victor explains:
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?
Two things. First, Victor has been pretty hellbent on inflicting curses, given his utter unwillingness to accept not just his complicity (oh no, I played God, albeit in good faith, and now I can't stop this thing I made) but active driving of the situation into its catastrophic pitch (I will treat you so inhumanly that the only response possible is to fully become the monster I've demanded you be). Perhaps he has no right, but that doesn't stop him from inflicting, and cultivating masterfully, a curse that until now has remained unwilling to lash out beyond the minor, closely-inscribed circle of Victor's social world (even as such a world has been, for Victor, crushingly burdened with the thickness of the bourgeois social world per se, in which every personal decision functions against the backdrop of all norms, in which maybe not really wanting to raise a family with your cousin becomes a perverse affront to the very category of family).
Second, the slippage between the existence of the species and the existence of discrete instances of that species, between "the human race" and "some humans." What's elided in his comment, in the escape toward the species as a whole, is the fact that the very condition of existence is, for the vast majority of the world, precarious and full of terror. (A condition that describes nothing so well as that of the creature itself.) Should the general grounding condition of human existence come to be precarious and terrifying, via its opposition to a hostile counter-species, it would only mean that the definition now closely matches the reality of its instances. That the conditions of the human are no longer predicated upon the conditions of existence for a minority, whose minoritarian and elite status requires a mode of existence for the wretched rest that will necessarily mark them as beyond the pale, lagging behind, degenerated, or surplus of the worst kind. Victor, one of the few "humans" (i.e. not precarious and terrified), has to make a choice to make it the case: he willfully produces an existence, through the construction of one existent thing, that will extend a rippling, staining, corrupting precarity through the hard work of declaring something to belong to nothing and nowhere.
To belong anywhere other than the no man's land, that is.
For the actual terror at stake, the conditional terror, and the destructive urge to dismantle the recently assembled bride, are necessarily tied to the first horror of the creature's coming alive. Given all the messy, gory work that's gone into it and a real familiarity with the face and body of it (you built it, for fuck's sake), we just don't buy the shock at having made something unholy, that the trespasses against the chain of being are visible in the scabrous, cracking smile. No. It is vacancy under attack and the the threat of social, domestic, mediated experience filling that necrological blank slate. The entreating glance up at Daddy, then coming to hang out, a lumbering mass of non-knowledge, and you suddenly realize that all your blasphemy, all your labor of escaping the realm of productive labor, of generation itself, insisting not on development from scratch but montage from scrap: it's all going to be the same old thing, again, the same cycles of prohibition and shame, disappointment and playing nice. The ultimate flight from the realm of the social, the oikos and polis alike, into a vicious, spiteful, remarkable form of waste management won't be enough. The inhuman thing must be worked on to become what it should be. And that working on means leaving alone, on blocking it from the creep of the social.
And so too the zones, the desert, the arctic, the deserted and frozen. The threat isn't the human itself, that the new species-being will be that of always under attack from a race built from your leftovers, but the inhuman. Those few and far between remaining zones left untouched, the poles of not-us, not-here on which the normal social order depends and to which Victor is drawn incessantly as flight out of the everyday. Not that they might not leave Europe (that teeming, mediocre hinterland), but that they will leave Europe, they'll go to the desert and fill it up. And after that first copulation, the first generation born will themselves be more of the same. Sure, Mom and Dad look a bit funny, the stitch-marks remain, but after that, the desert's full up with Europe-ness, with its enemies who couldn't look elsewhere other than to the constructive source who disowned them.
We're voracious for the empty because the horizontal creep of the bourgeois social world is even more so, devouring in negative, a consumption that eats only lack and absence, filling, thickening all. It infects, into these humanless wounds. Not the body politic, but a rot setting in without primary matter to work upon.
And the arctic? It's doomed to warmth. And it's the final act of secession that will make it such, the auto-immolatory funeral pyre of the creature in the lifeless north. As the fire built on the ice consumes him, the ice starts to moisten and melt. A circle of brief, flitting, licking warmth. His unrotting body (decay frozen not by temperature but by life itself, by the fact of his animation) now makes an aura, shadow, outline in the ice, and the bacteria will work, and more heat, melting more, rotting faster, slicker, uncovering other bits of lost matter gripped in the ice, now subject to putrefaction, and it spreads, the massive torrid heat of decomposition melting it all. First flies, then flowers, then birth. The ice blooms. And the fingers of the social sneak in to this enemy terrain, its shocktroops of intimacy and family, notching footholds for the lurching, drooling hulk of capitalist life itself.
There, flourishing once more, belittling their children for not wanting to propagate, stuffing full with new flesh the anti-social zone, the species proves itself once more unable to think its own extinction. Which is to say, unable to think at all.
All the beehives are plundered
[from Horse Lange's War Diaries]
In a dugout near Krashneva, September 26, 1941
[…] – Cold, restless night. Poor sleep. The bunkers are supposedly lice-ridden. Already you feel the itching. – Cold, gusts of rain. Big, sailing clouds. Constant hunger. I eat shameless amounts. In the morning our artillery on the neighboring hill shoots pointlessly over our heads at the Russians. – Around midday I go to the abandoned village of Krashneva, where our sappers gut the houses, taking planks and beams to reinforce their bunkers. The dead, ghostly magic of the houses, captivating me. The jumbled relics of past life. A cap still hangs on the peg. A string of beads on the ground. Colorful knitted bands to fasten the bast shoes. Schoolbooks (the same everywhere), family photographs, the parents, sons (trouser creases!) and daughters sit there stiffly, holding their breath in alarm. Icons in the corner, next to them the Communist posters, bright, loud and without an iota of taste. Potted plants. Two dead horses in a stall. A barn full of junk (sign of affluence!). Wild cats darting about and wailing hideously like angry household spirits. Beautiful vessels, the ancient, almost Stone-Age forms of jugs and iron pots. All the houses are missing windowpanes. The winter will snow in, the storm sweep through. – In the house gardens, where beets, cabbage, tomatoes and poppies grow, I look for onions without finding any. Birches everywhere, the village must have had an inviting look, like something described by Gogol or the author of “Adventure of a Hunter”3. – I go back, look at my watch and feel a bit uneasy. As soon as I’m over the hill and back in our ravine, the Russians shoot several heavy-caliber salvoes at Krashneva and the path I just took – aiming at the German guns that fired this morning. The shrapnel flies all the way to us. Only later do I realize how lucky I was. One becomes so jaded! Now I’m writing, barely able to read it, by the thin light of homemade wax candles. All the beehives are plundered. –
Girls fly like birds over the swamp
- Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point
Middlesex (or a certain management proves itself once more staggeringly ignorant of the fact that there's no way we'll let it end like this)
Philosophy students and staff suspended
Some Middlesex University Philosophy students, along with Philosophy professors Peter Osborne and Peter Hallward, were suspended from the University this afternoon. Hallward and Osborne were issued with letters announcing their suspension from the University with immediate effect, pending investigation into their involvement in the recent campus occupations. The suspension notice blocks them from entering University premises or contacting in any way University students and employees without the permission of Dean Ed Esche (e.esche@mdx.ac.uk) or a member of the University’s Executive.
The Campaign,
Friday afternoon, 21 May 2010.
Friday afternoon, 21 May 2010.
One ghost and one ghost only
(and it makes one wonder: why the need to assert this? They been getting loads of ghost reports lately? Just wanted to clear this up, everyone... The singular exception responds to its self-doubt, shores itself up against all those other minor phantoms, faith's declaration gets corrosive and starts to gnaw...)
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